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There is a period of a few millions of years to cover between the first “ mindless ” race and the highly intelligent and intellectual later “ Lemurians ” ; there is another between the earliest civilization of the Atlanteans and the historic period.
As witnesses to the Lemurians but a few silent records in the shape of half a dozen broken colossi and old cyclopean ruins are left. These are not allowed a hearing, as they are “ productions of blind natural forces,” we are assured by some ; “ quite modern ” we are told by others. Tradition is left contemptuously unnoticed by sceptic and materialist, and made subservient to the Bible in every case by the too zealous Churchman. Whenever a legend, however, refuses to fit in with the Noachian “ deluge theory,” it is declared by the Christian clergy “ the insanely delirious voice of old superstition.” Atlantis is denied, when not confused with Lemuria and other departed continents, because, perhaps, Lemuria is half the creation of modern science, and has, therefore, to be believed in ; while Plato’s Atlantis is regarded by most of the scientists as a dream.
Atlantis is often described by believers in Plato as a prolongation of Africa. An old continent is also suspected to have existed on the Eastern coast. Only Africa, as a continent, was never part and parcel of either Lemuria or Atlantis, as we have agreed to call the Third and Fourth Continents. Their archaic appellations are never mentioned in the
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Purânas, nor anywhere else. But with simply one of the esoteric keys in hand it becomes an easy task to identify these departed lands in the numberless “ lands of the gods,” Devas and Munis described in the Purânas, in their Varshas, Dwipas, and zones. Their Sweta-Dwipa, during the early day of Lemuria, stood out like a giant-peak from the bottom of the sea ; the area between Atlas and Madagascar being occupied by the waters till about the early period of Atlantis (after the disappearance of Lemuria), when Africa emerged from the bottom of the ocean, and Atlas was half-sunk.
It is of course impossible to attempt, within the compass of even several volumes, a consecutive and detailed account of the evolution and progress of the first three races — except so far as to give a general view of it, as will be done presently. Race the first had no history of its own. Of race the second the same may be said. We shall have, therefore, to pay careful attention only to the Lemurians and the Atlanteans before the history of our own race (the Fifth) can be attempted.
What is known of other continents, besides our own, and what does history know or accept of the early races ? Everything outside the repulsive speculations of materialistic science is daubed with the contemptuous term “ Superstition.” The wise men of to-day will believe nothing. Plato’s “ winged ” and hermaphrodite races, and his golden age, under the reign of Saturn and the gods, are quietly brought back by Hæckel to their new place in nature : our divine races are shown to be the descendants of Catarrhine apes, and our ancestor, a piece of sea slime.
Nevertheless, as expressed by Faber, “ the fictions of ancient poetry . . . . will be found to comprehend some portion of historical truth.” However one-sided the efforts of the learned author of the “ Mysteries of the Kabiri,” — efforts directed throughout his two volumes to constrain the classical myths and symbols of old paganism, “ to bear testimony to the truth of Scripture,” — time and further research have avenged, partially at least, that “ truth ” by showing it unveiled. Thus it is the clever adaptations of Scripture, on the contrary, which are made to bear evidence to the great wisdom of archaic paganism. This, notwithstanding the inextricable confusion into which the truth about the Kabiri — the most mysterious gods of antiquity — was thrown by the wild and contradictory speculations of Bishop Cumberland, Dr. Shuckford, Cudworth, Vallancey, etc., etc., and finally by Faber. Nevertheless, all, from first to last, o these scholars had to come to a certain conclusion framed by the latter. “ We have no reason to think,” he writes, “ that the idolatry of the Gentile world was of a merely arbitrary contrivance ; on the contrary, it seems to have been built, almost universally, upon a traditional remembrance of certain real events. These events I apprehend to be the destruction o
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the first (the fourth in esoteric teachings) Race of mankind by the waters of the Deluge.” (Chap. I. p. 9). To this, Faber adds : —
“ I am persuaded that the tradition of the sinking of the Phlegyan isle is the very same as that of the sinking of the island Atlantis. They both appear to me to allude to one great event, the sinking of the whole world beneath the waters of the deluge, or, if we suppose the arch of the earth to have remained in its original position, the rising of the central water above it. M. Bailly, indeed, in his work upon the Atlantis of Plato, the object of which is evidently to depreciate the authority of Scriptural chronology, labours to prove that the Atlanteans were a very ancient northern nation, long prior to the Hindoos, the Phœnicians, and the Egyptians.” (“ A Dissertation on the Kabiri,” p. 284.)
In this Faber is in agreement with Bailly, who shows himself more learned and intuitional than those who accept Biblical chronology. Nor is the latter wrong when saying that the Atlanteans were the same as the Titans and the giants. (See “ Lettres sur l’Atlantide.”) Faber adopts the more willingly the opinion of his French confrère, as Bailly mentions Cosmas Indico-Pleustes, who preserved an ancient tradition about Noah — that he “ formerly inhabited the island Atlantis ” (ibid). This island, whether it was the “ Poseidonis ” mentioned in “ Esoteric Buddhism,” or the Continent of Atlantis, does not much matter. The tradition is there, recorded by a Christian.
No Occultist would ever think of dispossessing Noah of his prerogatives, if he is claimed to be an Atlantean ; for this would simply show that the Israelites repeated the story of Vaivasvata Manu, Xisuthrus, and so many others, and that they only changed the name, to do which they had the same right as any other nation or tribe. What we object to is the literal acceptation of Biblical chronology, as it is absurd, and in accord with neither geological data nor reason. Moreover, if Noah was an Atlantean, then he was a Titan, a giant, as Faber shows ; and if a giant, then why is he not shown as such in Genesis ? *
Bailly’s mistake was to reject the submersion of Atlantis, and to call the Atlanteans simply a Northern and post diluvian nation, which, however, as he says, certainly “ flourished before the foundation of the Hindu, the Egyptian, and the Phœnician empires.” In this, had
* This is shown by Faber, again a pious Christian, who says that “ the Noetic family also . . . bore the appellations of Atlanteans and Titans, and the great patriarch himself was called by way of eminence Atlas and Titan.” (Vol. II. p. 285). And if so, then, according to the Bible, Noah must have been the progeny of the Sons of God, the fallen angels, agreeably to the same authority, and of the “ daughters of men who were fair,” (See Genesis, chap. vi.) And why not, since his father Lamech slew a man, and was, with all his sons and daughters (who perished in the Deluge), as bad as the rest of mankind ?
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he only known of the existence of what we have agreed to call Lemuria, he would have again been right. For the Atlanteans were post diluvian to the Lemurians, and Lemuria was not submerged as Atlantis was, but was sunk under the waves, owing to earthquakes and subterranean fires, as Great Britain and Europe will be one day. It is the ignorance of our men of science, who will accept neither the tradition that several continents have already sunk, nor the periodical law which acts throughout the Manvantaric cycle — it is this ignorance that is the chief cause of all the confusion. Nor is Bailly wrong again in assuring us that the Hindus, Egyptians, and Phœnicians came after the Atlanteans, for the latter belonged to the Fourth, while the Aryans and their Semitic Branch are of the Fifth Race. Plato, while repeating the story as narrated to Solon by the priests of Egypt, intentionally confuses (as every Initiate would) the two continents, and assigns to the small island which sunk last all the events pertaining to the two enormous continents, the prehistoric and traditional. Therefore, he describes the first couple, from whom the whole island was peopled, as being formed of the Earth. In saying so, he means neither Adam and Eve, nor yet his own Hellenic forefathers. His language is simply allegorical, and by alluding to “ Earth,” he means “ matter,” as the Atlanteans were really the first purely human and terrestrial race — those that preceded it being more divine and ethereal than human and solid.
Yet Plato must have known, as would any other initiated adept, about the history of the Third Race after its “ Fall,” though as one pledged to silence and secrecy he never showed his knowledge in so many words. Nevertheless, it may become easier now, after acquainting oneself with even the approximate chronology of the Eastern nations — all of which was based upon, and followed the early Aryan calculations — to realize the immense periods of time that must have elapsed since the separation of the sexes, without mentioning the First or even the Second Root-Races. As these must remain beyond the comprehension of minds trained in Western thought, it is found useless to speak in detail of the First and Second, and even of the Third Race in its earliest stage. * One has to begin with the latter, when it reached its full human period, lest the uninitiated reader should find himself hopelessly bewildered.
* In that wonderful volume of Donnelly’s “ Atlantis, the Antediluvian World,” the author, speaking of the Aryan colonies from Atlantis, and of the arts and sciences — the legacy of our Fourth Race — bravely announces that “ the roots of the institutions of to-day reach back to the Miocene age.” This is an enormous allowance for a modern scholar to make ; but civilization dates still further back than the Miocene Atlanteans. “ Secondary-period ” man will be discovered, and with him his long forgotten civilization.
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The third race fell — and created no longer : it begat its progeny. Being still mindless at the period of separation it begot, moreover, anomalous offspring, until its physiological nature had adjusted its instincts in the right direction. Like the “ lords the gods ” of the Bible, the “ Sons of Wisdom,” the Dhyan-Chohans, had warned them to leave alone the fruit forbidden by Nature : but the warning proved of no value. Men realized the unfitness — we must not say sin — of what they had done, only when too late : after the angelic monads from higher spheres had incarnated in, and endowed them with understanding. To that day they had remained simply physical, like the animals generated from them. For what is the distinction ? The doctrine teaches that the only difference between animate and inanimate objects on earth, between an animal and a human frame, is that in some the various “ fires ” are latent, and in others they are active. The vital fires are in all things and not an atom is devoid of them. But no animal has the three higher principles awakened in him ; they are simply potential, latent, and thus non-existing. And so would the animal frames of men be to this day, had they been left as they came out from the bodies of their Progenitors, whose shadows they were, to grow, unfolded only by the powers and forces immanent in matter. But as said in Pymander : —
“ This is a Mystery that to this day was sealed and hidden. Nature * being mingled with Man † brought forth a wondrous miracle ; the harmonious commingling of the essence of the Seven (Pitris, governors) and her own ; the Fire and the Spirit and Nature (the noumenon of matter) ; which (commingling) forthwith brought forth seven men of opposite sexes (negative and positive) according to the essences of the seven governors.” (Divine Pymander, Chap. I., Sect. 16.)
Thus saith Hermes, the thrice great Initiate, ‡ “ the Power of the
* Nature is the natural body, the shadow of the Progenitors ; and — —
† Man is the “ Heavenly man,” as already stated.
‡ The “ Pymander ” of our museums and libraries is an abridgement of one of the Books of Thoth, by a Platonist of Alexandria. In the Third Century it was remodelled after old Hebrew and Phœnician MSS. by a Jewish Kabalist, and called the “ Genesis of Enoch.” But even its disfigured remnants show how closely its text agrees with the Archaic Doctrine, as is shown in the creation of the Seven Creators and seven primitive men. As to Enoch, Thoth or Hermes, Orpheus and Kadmus, these are all generic names, branches and offshoots of the seven primordial sages (incarnated Dhyan Chohans or Devas, in illusive, not mortal bodies) who taught Humanity all it knew, and whose earliest disciples assumed their master’s names. This custom passed from the Fourth to the Fifth Race. Hence the sameness of the traditions about Hermes (of whom Egyptologists count five) Enoch, etc., they are all inventors of letters ; none oft hem dies but still lives, and they are the first Initiators into, and Founders of the Mysteries. The Genesis of Enoch disappeared only very lately among the Kabalists. Guillaume
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Thought Divine.” St. Paul, another Initiate, called our world “ the enigmatical mirror of pure truth,” and St. Gregory, of Nazianzen, corroborated Hermes by stating that “ things visible are but the shadow and delineation of things that we cannot see.” It is an eternal combination, and images are repeated from the higher rung of the ladder of being down to the lower. The “ Fall of the Angels,” and the “ War in Heaven ” are repeated on every plane, the lower “ mirror ” disfiguring the image of the superior mirror, and each repeating it in its own way. Thus the Christian dogmas are but the reminiscences of the paradigms of Plato, who spoke of these things cautiously, as every Initiate would. But it is all as expressed in these few sentences of the Desatir : —
“ All that is on Earth, saith the Lord (Ormazd), is the shadow of something that is in the superior spheres. This luminous object (light, fire, etc.) is the shadow of that which is still more luminous than itself, and so on till it reaches me, who am the light of lights.”
In the Kabalistic books, and in the Zohar pre-eminently, the idea that everything objective on earth or in this Universe is the Shadow — Dyooknah — of the eternal Light or Deity, is very strong.
The Third Race was pre-eminently the bright shadow, at first, of the gods, whom tradition exiles on Earth after the allegorical war in Heaven ; which became still more allegorical on Earth, for it was the war between spirit and matter. This war will last till the inner and divine man adjusts his outer terrestrial self to his own spiritual nature. Till then the dark and fierce passions of the former will be at eternal feud with his master, the Divine Man. But the animal will be tamed one day, because its nature will be changed, and harmony will reign once more between the two as before the “ Fall,” when even mortal man was created by the Elements and was not born.
The above is made clear in all the great theogonies, principally in the Grecian ( see Hesiod and Theogony ). The mutilation of Uranos by his son Kronos, who thus condemns him to impotency, has never been understood by the modern Mythographers. Yet, it is very plain ; and having been universal * (vide foot note infra), it must have contained a great abstract
Postel saw it. It was most certainly in a great measure a transcript from the books of Hermes, and far anterior to the Books of Moses, as Eliphas Lévi tells his readers.
* Uranos is a modified Varuna, “ the Universal encompasser,” the all-embracer, and one of the oldest of the Vedic deities — Space, the maker of Heaven and Earth, since both are manifested out of his (or its) seed. It is only later that Varuna became the chief of the Adityas and a kind of Neptune riding on the Leviathan — Makara, now the most sacred and mysterious of the signs of the Zodiac. Varuna, “ without whom no creature can even wink,” was degraded like Uranos, and, like him, he fell into generation, his functions, “ the grandest cosmical functions,” as Muir calls them, having been lowered down from heaven to earth by exoteric anthropomorphism. As the same
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and philosophical idea, now lost to our modern sages. This punishment in the allegory marks, indeed “ a new period, a second phase in the development of creation,” as justly remarked by Decharme (Mythologie de la Grèce Antique, p. 7), who, however, renounces the attempt to explain it. Uranos has tried to oppose an impediment to that development, or natural evolution, by destroying all his children as soon as born. Uranos, who personifies all the creative powers of, and in, Chaos (Space, or the unmanifested Deity) is thus made to pay the penalty ; for it is those powers which cause the Pitris to evolve primordial men from themselves — as, later on, these men evolve their progeny — without any sense or desire for procreation. The work of generation, suspended during a moment, passes into the hands of Kronos, * time, who unites himself with Rhea (the earth in esotericism — matter in general), and thus produces, after celestial — terrestrial Titans. The whole of this symbolism relates to the mysteries of Evolution.
This allegory is the exoteric version of the esoteric doctrine given in this part of our work. For in Kronos we see the same story repeated again. As Uranos destroyed his children from Gaia (one, in the world of manifestation, with Aditi or the Great Cosmic Deep) by confining them in the bosom of the Earth, Tythea, so Kronos at this second stage of creation destroyed his children from Rhea — by devouring them. This is an allusion to the fruitless efforts of Earth or Nature alone to create real human men. (See our Stanzas III. — X., et seq., and also Berosus’ account of primeval creation.) Time swallows its own fruitless work. Then comes Zeus — Jupiter, who dethrones his father in his turn. † Jupiter the Titan, is Prometheus, in one sense, ‡ and varies from Zeus, the Great
Orientalist says, “ The attributes ascribed to Varuna (in the Vedas) impart to his character a moral elevation and sanctity far surpassing that attributed to any other Vedic Deity.” But to understand correctly the reason of his fall, like that of Uranos, one has to see in every exoteric religion the imperfect and sinful work of man’s fancy, and also to study the mysteries which Varuna is said to have imparted to Vasishta. Only . . . “ his secrets and t hose of Mitra are not to be revealed to the foolish.”
* Kronos is not only Χρόνος, time, but also, as Brèal showed in his Hercule et Cacus (p. 57), comes from the root Kar, “ to make, to create.” Whether Brèal and Decharme, who quotes him, are as right in saying that in the Vedas Kronan is a creative god, we have our doubts. Brèal probably meant Karma, or rather Visva-Karma, the creative god, the “ Omnificent ” and the “ great Architect of the world.”
† The Titanic struggle, in theogony at least, is the fight for supremacy between the children of Uranos and Gaia (or Heaven and Earth in their abstract sense), the Titans, against the children of Kronos, whose chief is Zeus. It is the everlasting struggle going on to this day between the spiritual inner man and the man of flesh, in one sense.
‡ Just as the “ Lord God,” or Jehovah, is Cain esoterically, and the “ tempting serpent ” as well, the male portion of the androgynous Eve, before her “ Fall ; ” the female portion of Adam Kadmon ; the left side or Binah of the right side Chochmah in the first Sephirothal Triad.
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“ Father of the Gods.” He is the “ disrespectful son ” in Hesiod. Hermes calls him the “ Heavenly man ” (Pymander) ; and even in the Bible he is found again under the name of Adam, and, later on — by transmutation — under that of Ham. Yet these are all personifications of the “ sons of Wisdom.” The necessary corroboration that Jupiter belongs to the purely human Atlantean cycle — if Uranus and Kronos who precede him are found insufficient — may be found in Hesiod, who tells us that the Immortals have made men and created the Golden and the Silver age (First and Second Races) ; while Jupiter created the generations of Bronze (an admixture of two elements), of Heroes, and the men of the age of Iron. After this he sends his fatal present, by Pandora, to Epimetheus, * which present Hesiod calls “ a fatal gift,” or the first woman. It was a punishment, he explains, sent to man “ for the theft of divine creative fire.” Her apparition on earth is the signal of every kind of evil. Before her appearance, the human races lived happy, exempt from sickness and suffering — as the same races are made to live under Yima’s rule, in the Mazdean Vendidad.
Two deluges may also be traced in universal tradition by carefully comparing Hesiod, the Rig Veda, the Zend-Avesta, etc., while no first man is ever mentioned in any of the theogonies save the Bible. † Everywhere the man of our race appears after a cataclysm of water, after which tradition mentions only the several designations of continents and islands which sink under the ocean waves in due time. ‡ “ Gods and mortals have one common origin ” says Hesiod (ibid. v. 1c8) ; and Pindar echoes the statement (Nem. VI., 1). Deucalion and Pyrrha, who escape the Deluge by constructing an ark like Noah’s (see Apollod., 1, 7, 2, and Ovid, Metam. 1, 260, 899.), ask Jupiter to re-animate the human race whom he had made to perish under the waters of the Flood. In the Slavonian Mythology (Lithuanian legend, in Grimm, Deutsche Myth. 1, 545), all men were drowned, and two old people, a man and his wife, alone remained. Then Pram-gimas (the “ master of all ”) advised them to jump seven times on the rocks of the earth, and seven new races (couples) were born, from which came the nine Lithuanian tribes. As well understood by the author of the Mythologie de la Grèce Antique — the four ages
* In the Egyptian legend, translated by M. Maspero (the ex-director of the Bulaq Museum), called the “ two Brothers,” the original of Pandora is given. Noum, the famous heavenly artist, creates a marvellous beauty, a girl which he sends to Batoo, after which the happiness of the latter is destroyed. Batoo is man, and the girl Eve, of course. (See Maspero’s Egyptian Legends, and also Decharme’s “ Mythologie de la Grèce Antique.”)
† Yima is not the “ first man ” in the Vendidad, but only in the theories of the Orientalists. — See further on.
‡ Bœotia, then ancient Athens, and Eleusis were submerged.
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signify periods of time, and are also an allegorical allusion to the races. “ The successive races, destroyed and replaced by others,” he says, “ without any period of transition, are characterized in Greece by the name of metals, to express their ever-decreasing value. Gold, the most brilliant and precious of all, symbol of purity . . . . qualifies the first race. . . . . The men of the second race, those of the age of Silver, are already inferior to the first. Inert and weak creatures, all their life is no better than a long and stupid infancy. . . . They disappear. . . . The men of the age of Bronze are robust and violent (the third race) ; their strength is extreme. They had arms made of bronze, habitations of bronze ; used nought but bronze. Iron, the black metal, was yet unknown ” (Op. at D., 143 — 155). The fourth generation (race) is, with Hesiod, that of the heroes who fell before Thebes (see “ The Seven Against Thebes,” by Æschylus), or under the walls of Troy.
Thus, the four races being found mentioned by the oldest Greek poets, though very much confused anachronistically, our doctrines are once more corroborated by the classics. But this is all “ Mythology ” and poetry. What can modern science have to say to such an euhemerization of old fictions ? The verdict is not difficult to foresee. Therefore an attempt must be made to answer by anticipation, and prove that fictions and empirical speculations are so much of the domain of that same science, that none of the men of learning have the slightest right, with such a heavy beam in their own eye, to point to the speck in the eye of the Occultist, even if that speck be not a figment of our opponents’ imagination.